


Everything's Gonna Be Alright

by JoyHeart



Category: Dungeons and Daddies (Podcast)
Genre: Dealing With Trauma, Epilogue, Gen, Post-Canon, afterwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28059102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoyHeart/pseuds/JoyHeart
Summary: After they got back from the Forgotten Realms, everything's a bit different, for better or for worse, in small ways or in big ones. They all deal with it in their own way to move forward, but in the end, they know everything's somehow gonna be alright.
Relationships: Henry Oak/Mercedes Oak-Garcia, Ron Stampler/Samantha Stampler
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32





	Everything's Gonna Be Alright

**Author's Note:**

> This is another prompt, this one being "all of the kids at their first soccer game after faerun" and "ron stampler meeting mercedes oak garcia"
> 
> This one... got away from me a bit, but we got that prompt in there somewhere.

**It’s Gonna Be Alright**

Of course they had missed the soccer tournament. Only by a few hours, which did not account for the deeply scarred psyches and bodies of the four men and five boys that had entered Faerun earlier that same day. They had come through a portal to find the Odyssey flipped over (though still salvageable) in the ditch next to the road, wheels still spinning.

At first Henry had tried to summon vines to help flip the car over again, but found no magic at his fingertips. Then they had tried the old fashioned way, all the dads scrambling to try and turn it over by hand.

When that didn’t work, the finally called triple-A and their wives (thankfully well and alive after their safety was assured by the time-witch they did that side-quest for) who all came to pick them up. Some with a relieved smile (Mercedes), some with a confused misunderstanding of the situation (Samantha), and some with a look of irritation (Carol). Though that irritation was probably well earned since not only did it appear as though Darryl had flipped his car and she had no immediate evidence his ‘travelled to another world’ story was even true, but she had to drive home Glenn and Nick as well and both still had enough of a weed stink about them that it was also permeating her own car.

As time would pass, she would finally come to believe the story to some extent since all the men and boys seemed certain of the events and Grant certainly seemed like he had been through… something. Though it hurt to know Grant had been through something so traumatic and no matter how hard Carol tried… some part of her might always fail to completely believe what she was told about the Forgotten Realms. She understood Primer, sci-fi, but fantasy? Magic? Carol watched her son with regret as he noticed the subtleties of her disbelief and withdrew from her. She knew, with calm and sad certainty, which parent he would be living with when the divorce went through.

In the weeks following their return, the boys and their dads had a hard time re-adjusting to the hum-drum day-to-day life on earth. It wasn’t made simpler by the fact that there wasn’t even a reasonable gap of time for them to have been traumatized in, and as far as the teachers at the middle school, or the dad’s coworkers were aware they had all just managed to survive an unfortunate car accident and that wasn’t really enough for them to understand why all of them were suddenly… different.

*

Some had an easier time explaining their changes than others.

For Grant, his new uneasy quiet and unexpected hobby of drawing rather… violent images into the margins of his textbooks during class was mainly chalked up as an adverse reaction to learning of his parents’ upcoming divorce. Darryl and Carol had of course sent him to therapy and it seemed to be helping curb some of his reported feelings of numbness, though he and Darryl would often spend evenings driving off to the edge of the city, getting out of the car to look at the familiar constellations of earth and talk about what they went through, what they were still going through.

That helped a bit more than the therapy sessions, which by nature of his situation Grant couldn’t be wholly truthful in.

“When I tell her about stuff that happened, I say it’s all nightmares I’ve had,” Grant had admitted. “It makes it easier, and well, it’s sort of true. I… I still have nightmares.”

“That’s okay kiddo, so do I,” Darryl had said quietly in the half-light of the moon, and Grant and hugged him and heaved a sob into his shirt.

Darryl had been looking for a job as the time when Mercedes would be moving out and leaving him with child-support payments loamed closer. Sometimes it was hard to get out of bed and head down to the employment center and run through temp agency after temp agency looking for something that wouldn’t leave Grant alone in the evenings and nights. That didn’t leave much available, but he swore he would make sure when he went back to work Grant would have someone with him if he needed him there in the middle of the night.

*

For Nick and Glenn Close, there wasn’t much difference to be seen by an outside observer. Nick was never very vocal in class. He was going to class a bit more than he used to, his grades had improved a bit since Uncle Jimmy had started dropping by on weekends to tutor him, but when he vanished at lunchtimes everyone kind of assumed he was hiding out somewhere smoking a joint. No one saw him with his knees curled into his chest, phone clutched in his hand in a white-knuckled grip while his dad repeated into his ear over and over that he was fine, he would be there when Nick got home from school, he could get through the rest of the school day.

His dad never quite seemed sure if he was saying the right thing, and sometimes he’d try to crack a joke that Nick would groan through, but just hearing his voice helped.

Knowing he almost lost his dad forever, in a way where he wouldn’t have even _known_ about it was just… he couldn’t do it again, he couldn’t lose his dad again. And Glenn was trying so hard now to understand that. To reassure him he wouldn’t let that happen, not ever again.

And when Nick went home after school, Glenn was there every time. Usually with dinner (breakfast for him) cooking on the stove. They didn’t hug when Nick came in, Glenn still wasn’t comfortable with physical affection even now. But they’d high five, and he would ask Nick how his day went, and he was… there.

And it was enough. Nick didn’t need his dad to smother him with affection. He was there now, at least in the evening. He still had to leave just before Nick went to bed to get to the factory job he’d picked up since his music career ‘wasn’t working for him anymore’ as he put it. He was still gone while Nick was asleep and they only saw each other in passing in the morning when Glenn staggered in the door and collapsed into bed, exhausted.

But Glenn picked up the phone when Nick called. And he was there when he got home from school. For now that was enough, and if any of the people who knew Glenn thought it was weird that he had suddenly decided to ‘sell out’ and get a real job, none bothered to call him and tell him so.

*

Lark hadn’t changed that much, really. If his violence was tempered any, if he was a little more likely to obey authority when they threatened to call his father, that was more likely to be called a miracle that shouldn’t be questioned by any of his teachers or classmates.

Sparrow, on the other hand, was much harder to understand and accommodate for. After the first few days back, his gym teacher had actually called Mercedes at her work and spoke to her with concern in his voice that her son might have ‘some kind of brain injury’.

“Just last Friday he hit a kid with a dodgeball so hard that they had to go to the nurse and he was crowing with victory! Today he said dodgeball was too violent and just did yoga positions in the back of the room for the whole class! I mean, he’s astoundingly flexible, but that’s not… that’s not the Sparrow Oak-Garcia I know! His brother’s the same but-”

“Oh, that, yes, hm, Sparrow’s just going through a…. a ‘pacifist’ phase,” Mercedes had said, thinking on her feet and intentionally putting a dreamy air into her voice. She usually did that when folks called her about her sons breaking a window in a fit of childish passion, using it because Sparrow was refusing to cause harm was new but not unwelcome. “He ah… met his grandfather on the weekend and had a long talk with his father about inner strength! At his age, of course, the mind is still developing in new ways, he simply wants to explore the many advantages of a life spent at peace.”

The gym teacher had sounded dubious. “His brother hasn’t changed any, why just Sparrow? Doesn’t seem right to me.”

Mercedes had blinked, incredulous. Her dreamy, radio-voice dropped. “Are you saying if one of my beautiful twin boys decides to change something about themselves, the other is OBLIGATED to do the same? You know they’re two wonderful _individuals_ , yes?”

The gym teacher grumbled. “Yeah, I guess, but if Sparrow won’t do the class-assigned activities then he isn’t going to pass. What healthy kid won’t play dodgeball?”

Mercedes felt a fire in her throat. “Well I think it’s ADMIRABLE that my boy doesn’t want to hurt anyone, and if you disagree with that then maybe I’ll tell the school board that you refuse to offer non-violent options for your gym classes! Or maybe my radio station will have an expose on your curriculum that glorifies and enforces violent behavior in pre-teens!”

“I- have a good day, ma’am,” the gym teacher muttered and hung up.

Mercedes had a long rant in Spanish in the kitchen to her husband’s understanding nods. When Lark and Sparrow came home from school that day, Mercedes had hugged Sparrow for a long time.

She was lucky. It seemed that her boys and husband had been more relaxed than traumatized by the events in Faerun (though Henry still would hold her too gently sometimes as though convinced she could crumble to dust in his hands).

But she wished she had been there with them. Not just because it was a fantasy adventure full of magic and monsters the likes of which she had dreamed of since she was a child. But because then she could share in those little inside jokes they had now. The shared knowing looks. She would be a part of the strange new wisdom and energy that flowed between them, then, surely.

She wished she knew someone who would understand that.

*

Samantha knew she didn’t always follow what was going on. Sometimes she was self-conscious of that, but a few people in her life had never let her feel that way. Terry, before he passed, had always seemed so strong and in control. He could do the taxes and handle the car payments and never once made her feel bad when she would look at the paperwork and the numbers would swim in front of her eyes. He would only grin and tell her it was fine, he didn’t mind dealing with the math as long as she kept doing the ‘heavy lifting’ in the relationship. And of course Samantha never minded that. She always enjoyed yard work, and she when she heard Terry bragging to his friends over how she could change the car’s oil in under a minute and change a tire in five, she had blushed from her neck to her toes.

But in the end, she wondered if doing the heavy lifting had mattered at all. Terry still had a heart attack after all. He was gone, and it hurt so much, for so long, in so many little ways. She couldn’t lean on Terry to do her math anymore. She had to pay an accountant, and hadn’t that felt embarrassing when she would look at her finances and could answer none of their questions. The irritation was palpable, and after the fact she had holed up in her bedroom, holding one of Terry’s sweater-vests to her chest and sobbing.

And yet she continued on. She kept going to work, putting food on the table, getting her son to school. They became a team of two, and when Samantha worked longer hours, Terry Junior took on more of the yard work she used to love doing. When the bills began piling on the table, Terry Junior would remind her of them and read them to her, helping her fill out forms. And she felt a little silly, needing her ten year old son to held her with paperwork, but Terry Junior never once complained. He was so much like his father, could handle so much.

So one day Samantha decided she wanted to give her son something to ease some of the empty space left in their hearts. So she had begun looking at ads for adoptable dogs on the internet. So, somehow, this had led to her meeting Ron Stampler and her life changed drastically yet again.

Ron wasn’t like Terry. In some ways that made things harder. When they would go to a restaurant, Ron would be as happy to read her the menu as Terry had been, but he would read too loud or too fast sometimes, and that could be embarrassing at times when eyes would turn to stare at them. Ron was good with numbers, like Terry had been, but Samantha still had to go to an accountant because it seemed that someone had taught Ron to do taxes in a way that was… less than legal, and it was hard to explain to him why he might have to do them differently.

But in certain ways, being with Ron also felt a little better than being with Terry. While Terry was always careful around Samantha’s feelings regarding her severe dyslexia, being around him still made her feel inadequate sometimes, like she didn’t deserve him, like she couldn’t do enough to make up for what he did for her.

With Ron she never felt that way. With Ron, she felt like she was teaching him as much as he eagerly taught her, and that was wonderful. If only she could have found the words to explain all that to her son. But as she waved goodbye to Ron and Terry Junior the morning of that soccer tournament, she was left once again wondering if she was being selfish, forcing yet another change in Terry Junior’s life after going through everything with his father. Maybe she should’ve waited longer to marry Ron, to let him move in. But she had been so in love, so happy to find someone she cared about so much after Terry, she had just assumed her son would surely warm up to Ron like she had…

And then they had come back from the soccer tournament. No, she had picked them up. There had been a car accident, only, Ron was talking about having been in another world, something about his father kidnapping Terry Junior. And Terry Junior was letting Ron just call him Terry?

Samantha was used to huge changes in her life by this point, good and bad, but having something change as starkly as her husband and son’s relationship without being sure exactly what changed it was somewhat alarming.

Over the days after the tournament, both had showered her with attention every moment, and suddenly there wasn’t the tension they had between them anymore. Both nestling into her sides while watching a movie, Terry Junior insisting they all do a puzzle together. Ron no longer hesitated when talking to Terry Junior, Terry Junior didn’t leave the room when Ron entered, and Samantha even saw them _hug_ once.

They had explained to her several times what had happened in that strange place, Faerun, but Samantha was never entirely sure if it was something that happened, a movie they saw together, or some elaborate game they played. She had heard something like that before, one of the younger girls at work said she did something like… LARPing? She asked Terry Junior if he had been LARPing with Ron, and he had sighed, shook his head, and gave his mother a bright smile with an assurance not to worry about it.

So Samantha tried not to worry about it, but after a couple of weeks she asked Terry Junior why he hadn’t been going to soccer practice and just watching how the word made Terry and Ron both go still and exchange a look she had never seen before, she worried anyway.

*

They waited a month before they tried going to soccer practice again. Classes had been hard enough, extra-circulars just felt like too much for a while. They all needed a break. But as much as they needed a break, they also needed normalcy. A return to the things they had enjoyed, even if they all felt different now.

And they were different, very different. Classmates and teammates that once felt as close as any friends that age before Faerun now felt dim, like near-strangers. Like… well, like a person who was your friend a year ago and then you had drifted apart. They would talk about things that had happened last week, last month, and the boys just couldn’t remember any of that anymore. It was too long ago, now. And anything they spoke about, schoolyard drama, math class… it all felt so… strange, now. Too much had happened.

“Hmm, I would compare it to speaking to children a few grades younger, would you not brother Lark?” Sparrow had said, perfectly balancing the soccer ball on his head as the group of them had milled around after practice one day, waiting to be picked up by Darryl in the new, refurbished Odyssey. “They haven’t had the same worldly experiences as us. It’s hard not to feel… apart from them.”

“I agree, brother. However, I would also like to pose that our other teammates have always had the reflexes of adorable baby sloths?”

Nick and Terry Junior had laughed at that. Grant had taken a moment and laughed late, but no one commented on the delay. It was fine, really, if their other friends found them kind of weird, now. Kind of off. Lark and Sparrow had always gotten by as being class clowns and always considered a bit strange. Nick avoiding the other stoner kids wasn’t met with praise but it didn’t hurt him any. They kind of sucked, anyway. Terry Junior tried harder than the rest of them to reintegrate himself with his old friends and was doing the best at acting like everything was fine, though Grant’s proverbial shut down had made him a bit more of a social pariah.

It didn’t matter, because the five of them had each other. And that helped. It was okay that they were different, because they were different together.

*

The first soccer game after Faerun came not too long after the boys had returned to practice, and it seemed their parents were determined to embarrass them with the biggest display of affectionate over-enthusiasm they could muster.

Darryl and Carol had each shown up in separate cars in full Doodler’s body paint with gigantic signs decrying ‘GRANT WILSON #1’, to Grant’s horror. Ron and Samantha had been more conservative, instead each wearing a Doodler’s t-shirt and only yelling ‘GO TERRY, YOU KICK BALLS REAL GOOD!’ every time they saw their blushing son.

Henry and Mercedes had brought boxes of vegan snacks for the other boys’ parents. As Mercedes had pressed a vegan chocolate chip cookie into Ron’s hand, she had given him a blinding smile.

“Hello, you must be Ron! I’ve heard so much about you from Henry, you saved _mi Le_ _όn_ more than once! I cannot thank you enough, it’s such a shame we haven’t met yet! Darryl has been lovely of course, but I’ve wanted to meet you as well, of course!” Then she had hugged Ron tightly. When she drew back, she realized with a start that Ron had dropped the cookie on the ground. “Oops! Did I do that? Here, have another!”

“Uh, no thank you.”

“No? Come on, they’re chocolate chip! Everyone likes chocolate chip cookies!”

“No thank you, uh, I don’t like chocolate. Too spicy for me, ha ha,” Ron shoved his hands in his pockets to avoid further attempts to force a cookie on him. “However, if you have any plain digestive biscuits, um, I would like one of those, please.”

“Oh, no I don’t…”

“Don’t worry, I do!” Samantha appeared at Ron’s side, digging into her purse until she pulled out a small, crumpled silver package. She opened it and frowned. “Oh, they’re broken.”

“That’s even better!” Ron smiled, happily taking the package from his wife and digging a small piece out with his pinky finger. “That should just make it extra digestible, right?”

“Right!” Samantha giggled. Mercedes looked between the two of them and gave them a bemused smile.

“You’re… just like Henry said.”

“I am?” Ron blinked owlishly, and Samantha put her arm around him, hoping it didn’t look too defensive.

“Yes,” Mercedes said, smiling brilliantly again, “You’re cute as a button! And so’s your hot wife, of course!”

Both Ron and Samantha blushed.

While most of the team had already had their hellos with their parents and taken to the field for warm-ups, Nick milled on the edge of the field, hands in his pockets and kicking an empty Gatorade bottle around. He tried to tell himself that everything was fine. His dad had taken the night off so he could ‘stay up later’, but he was so tired lately, he’d probably just fallen asleep. He could still show up late. It wasn’t like he needed his dad to play soccer.

In the middle of those thoughts, however, his dad’s beater had driven by in a cloud of o-zone choking carbon emissions. Glenn had honked long and loud, parked illegally next to a fire hydrant, and jumped out of the car and started running straight at his son.

“Dad!” Nick had gasped, running toward Glenn who, for the first time Nick could remember since that one time in the Forgotten Realms when they had thought they were going to die for real, opened his arms for a hug. Nick flung himself into his dad’s arms.

The hug didn’t last long, only a few seconds before Glenn started to stiffen and Nick let go. But it was something, his dad was trying. Nick knew he was trying. It really was enough.

“Dad, I-I thought you fell asleep!”

“Dude, I totally did, I’m sorry!” Glenn ran a hand through his hair, eyes wild as he looked at the players on the field, several familiar ones were looking back at them. “Geez, must’ve embarrassed you there, huh? Hugging your old man in front of your friends, heh.”

“I wasn’t- I’m not embarrassed,” Nick said quickly, ignoring the way his dad stiffened again. “I have the coolest dad ever, they all _wish_ they got to hug you.”

Glenn paused, then snorted, grabbing Nick around the neck without warning and giving him a merciless noogie. “If I’m not embarrassing you, I’m not doing my job!”

“Ah, dad, get off!” Nick whined, struggling in his dad’s grip.

When he got back to the field, his dad high fiving Darryl, Ron, and Henry in the stands above them, Nick got a few of his teammates nudging him in the ribs and calling him a daddy’s boy. But that was fine. Nick rolled his eyes and took it in stride. It didn’t matter to him if his teammates didn’t think he was cool. Maybe once it would’ve, but now it didn’t.

His dad was there. Sometimes it didn’t feel like it, sometimes it hurt to think that way. But his dad was different now. He was different now.

They were all different now, but that was okay. Everything was going to be alright.


End file.
